The Bible Speaks: Politics and the Path to Progressive Theology
Political and social divisiveness in our world has reached a fever pitch. These divisions are infiltrating the church and threatening our unity. What is the Christian role in these divisive political and social issues? To address this, Crossings Community Church presents The Bible Speaks: Politics - Teaching Series. This class is available in person in the OKC Venue or online at venue.crossings.church, the Crossings App, and Facebook Live.
Politics: Teaching Series Schedule
- Aug 25, 2021: Politics: Separation of Church and State
- Sep 8, 2021: Politics: Christians and Political Parties
- Sep 29, 2021: Politics: Early Believers and the Spirit
- Oct 6, 2021: Politics: The Spirit of Politics
The Creation of Progressive Theology
“The Bible and Prayer” won’t fix my Progressive theology—they created it. My reply is always the same: “Reading the Bible and praying over it—is precisely how I became Progressive.” For more than forty years as a Christian and two decades as a pastor in the local church, I’ve lived with the Bible: I’ve read it for inspiration and for information. I’ve studied it in seminary and in small groups and in solitude. I’ve done hundreds of Bible studies and sat through months of sermons. I’ve taught it and preached it and reflected on it for hours upon hours upon hours.
The more I excavated the Scriptures and reflected on what I’d learned, the more I felt a shift in my understanding. Little by little, through this continual process of study and prayer and living, I found myself unable to believe things I once believed. Old sureties became unstable and new things became my bedrock.
A Different View of the Bible
Over time, I gradually but quite surely began to see the Bible differently, and it has led me to this place and to the convictions I now hold. No longer some perfect, leather-bound divine transcript, dictated by God and downloaded into a few men’s heads or dropped from the sky—the Bible for me became an expansive library written by flawed, failing human beings at a particular place and time in the history of humanity, recording their experience of God as best they could comprehend it.
In that library I could find wisdom and meaning, and through those words I could seek God and understand humanity, and craft a working religion to live within. But I could also bring other things to bear upon this journey; things like Science and History, things like nature and community and other faith traditions—and yes, my personal experience living as a never-to-be-repeated human being.
The Essence of Progressive Faith
This is the beauty of Progressive Christianity: it doesn’t insist that others agree with it, it doesn’t claim superiority, and it holds its conclusions loosely. That doesn’t mean it has arrived at its present place impulsively, lazily, or ignorantly. I’ve met thousands of Christians who hold more liberal positions on all sorts of topics, who didn’t begin that way. They have come to those positions after years or even decades of careful, prayerful, faithful exploration. They are as intelligent, invested, and earnestly seeking as their more orthodox brethren.